A cure for sore lips
by Sophia Anya Lee
Summary: Annabeth has sore lips, she's mad at a certain son of Poseidon ... Percy just wanted to help. Of course, being Percy, things can ... and often, do get messed up. Percabeth! With a unexpected ending! Read and review!


**Right. I was bored. Bad excuse, I know, as I'm always bored. This isn't first class writing, and I've written it for pure entertainment as opposed to my normal doctrine of writing perfectly and (over) descriptively. Ah well, I deserve a break after exams. Bon appetite, Percabeth lovers!**

**A cure for sore lips**

**By Nymph of the Night**

Percy Jackson squinted around anxiously, his eyebrows arched over a pair of sea green eyes as he gasped for breath. His intense gaze came to a rest at the foot of a towering sycamore tree where a tall, blonde-haired girl sat, huddled, her hands moving repeatedly to her lips in a gesture Percy could not fathom. He frowned at the girl's atypical behaviour and strode purposefully towards the tree, coming to a halt right next to her crouched figure.

"Uh, Annabeth," he said tentatively, peering down at her, an eyebrow raised as she continued to fondle her lips delicately. "What are you doing?"

Annabeth's head jerked up, her hand still covering her mouth and she glared murderously. "What do you want, Seaweed Brain?" At least, that was what she had meant to say, but it came out as an unintelligible mumble through her tightly clasped fingers.

Percy shifted his feet slightly in hesitation before answering her. "Uh, Chiron asked me to call you. We have archery, remember?"

"I'm not coming!" she snapped obstinately, glowering up at him even more viciously, as though nothing would please her better than to feed him to the harpies.

Percy quickly ran through his mind a list of things, he might have done to annoy Annabeth, but nothing seemed to come up. He had had an innocent enough day, that is, as innocent as you could get for a half-blood.

"What'll I tell Chiron?"

"You work that out! It's your fault!"

Percy grimaced inwardly at the unfairness of the situation. Here was Annabeth, behaving like a perfect baby, refusing to come down to archery and then, blaming him for something he hadn't done.

"How do you figure that?" he retorted coldly, but his icy demeanour had no effect on Annabeth.

"You insulted Silena!" she accused, still refusing to remove the hand covering her mouth.

Percy stared in surprise, his feeling etched all over his face. He hadn't been expecting this. Since when had Silena and Annabeth become such great friends?

"So?"

"So?!?!" Annabeth exploded furiously, pulling out grass to vent out her frustration and throwing it on his face. Percy choked as he accidentally inhaled the dirt and turned an singular shade of algae green, but Annabeth paid him no attention. "You insulted her! She's going out with Beckendorf, you dork!"

Percy continued to stare politely, none of Annabeth's rambling were making sense to him. Annabeth looked like she wanted to whack him on the head with Hercules' club, but instead, she just removed her hand from over her mouth.

Percy winced, realising why Annabeth was making an undue fuss about everything. It was her lips. They looked like they had been stung by a whole swarm of particularly brutal bees, as they bulged out, red and puffy, and cracked where tiny drops of blood forced their way out.

Feeling stupid, he asked reluctantly, "What happened?"

Annabeth rolled her eyes in grim defeat. "Percy, calling you Seaweed Brain is an insult to seaweed, not to you … even seaweed have more thinking capacity."

Percy felt hot and fervently hoped Annabeth could not see the scarlet flush slowly creeping into his cheeks.

"Beckendorf, you idiot! He works in the forges and he's going out with Silena! When he heard you'd insulted Silena, he didn't say much. He asked me to blow all those stupid tiny machine parts over the lava for three hours instead, hoping that by punishing me, you'd be punished too, though I don't know how he works that out." She glared at him, looking positively scary with her puffy lips. Percy felt his legs turn into jell-o."I don't even know why I put up with you."

"Sorry," Percy stammered incoherently, thinking back to that morning when he had yelled at Silena when she'd deprecatingly informed him even a pigsty looked better than his cabin.

"Sorry!" Annabeth thundered rancorously, standing up and yelling in his face. "You think saying sorry helps?!?"

Percy's mind was in a whirr. He had two milliseconds to decide what to do before Annabeth pounded his individual organs into ground meat. On the spur of the moment, he leaned in and kissed her sore lips gently.

When he pulled away, Annabeth stared at him, looking shell-shocked. Percy decided that his so-called 'brain flash' hadn't not worked and shifted his feet, keen to put as much as distance as he could between the stunned Annabeth. Part of him was feeling extremely hurt and put-off – he'd loved Annabeth and had always fantasized about kissing her, though this first kiss was turning out to be nightmarish as opposed to his fantasies, where he had always envisaged Annabeth kissing him back passionately. His face turned an interesting shade of purple, rich enough to make Mr. D envious, but his eyes were prickling with hot tears of humiliation.

After what seemed like eternity, on that sunny hillside, Annabeth squeaked in a small voice, pointing to her lower lip shakily, "It still hurts here. You think you could do it again?"

**The End.**

**Copyright 2008.**

_If you read that, do review! They make my day! Please!_


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